Google hired this 'brilliant' kid at 18 — now his startup serves more than 1,000 businesses and just scored $15 million

Not a lot of people get to work at Google, much less before
entering college.

But for Larry Gadea, founder of visitor-registration software
Envoy, a job at Google just kind of came naturally right after
high school, at the age of 18.

Gadea started programming when he was 8 years old. He loved
computers and was already writing games by high school.

But it was a plug-in he developed for Google Desktop Search that
put him on Google’s radar. It would allow the users to find and
index files in their computers that Google Desktop Search
couldn’t. It made the search feature a lot more useful, and
immediately became super popular.

“Google Desktop Search didn’t allow plug-ins at the time. Mine
was a hack that made Google allow plug-ins,” Gadea told Business
Insider.

One day, in his high school senior year, Gadea received a random
email from Google. Terrified that he might have done something
illegal, Gadea nervously opened the email. It read, “Why are you
doing this stuff on your own? Why don’t you do this with us?”

“They wanted me there full-time. I was super excited, an 18 year
old getting a Google offer,” Gadea recalls.

But there was one big problem: Google didn’t know Gadea was that
young. Being Canadian, Gadea needed a visa to work full-time in
the US, but not having a college degree essentially made it
impossible to get the visa approval.

So instead of working full-time, Gadea interned at Google’s
Mountain View office during the summer before going to college.
After his three-month internship was over, Google wanted him back
so they gave him another offer: they hired him as one of the
first few engineers at Google Canada, and allowed him to work
there part-time during the full four years of college.

After college, Gadea wanted to try something new. Twitter was an
up-and-coming startup, so he asked his boss at Google if she
could connect him with the company.

“She introduced me to [Twitter’s cofounder] Ev Williams. I did an
interview and they were the first to give me an offer,” Gadea
said.

For the next three years, Gadea worked as a back end engineer at
Twitter. There, he created “Murder,” a data center optimization
technology that played a big role in reducing "Fail Whales,” the
term used to describe Twitter’s frequent crashes in its early
years.

But by 2012, Gadea wanted to try something new again. This time,
he wanted to start his own company.

Envoy builds a
visitor-registration softwareEnvoy

Gadea took nearly a year off, meeting people to find a startup
idea. That idea came while visiting friends at Apple and Google.

“It was weird that Google and Apple had you type in your
information in a computer at the front desk, but smaller
companies didn’t have that technology,” he tells us. “Either the
receptionist would leave the desk and find the person, or there’d
be no one at all.”

He later realized the big companies had their engineers develop
its own visitor check-in software. Smaller companies didn’t have
the resources to do that, leaving them open to greater security
risk at their office.

So in 2013, Gadea built a software called Envoy that could be
used at offices to check-in people and keep track of visitors. It
would basically allow visitors to sign-in through an iPad app,
and print out a name tag with their photos on it. Its latest app
can send push notifications to the iPhone and even show the
person’s photo on the Apple Watch.

Soon, Envoy took off, signing up over 1,000 offices, including
companies like Airbnb, Pandora, GoPro, and Tesla — all on
word-of-mouth.

That kind of success explains why on Tuesday, Envoy announced a
$15 million Series A investment by Andreessen Horowitz, with its
general partner Chris Dixon joining the board. The new financing
comes after raising $1.5 million from Silicon Valley bigwigs,
including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Quora’s Adam D’Angelo, and
Yelp’s Jeremy Stoppelman in November 2014.

"If you go around Silicon Valley today, almost every startup you
go to has Envoy at the front desk. It’s sort of become a hit
viral app," Dixon told us. "Larry's a prodigy. He's just a
classic scrappy, super brilliant Silicon Valley entrepreneur."